Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

• work on Moonchild (writing project) all seven days – did six.
• work on blog at least five days – did four.
• at least seven sessions of digitizing old writing – DONE.
• craft and send an important tweet – didn’t even think about it, will have to put this back on for next week.

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions – did six.
• get up through song 98 of Book One of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – just one new song this week, it has melody, harmony and rhythm parts and it’s long so it’ll be plenty to keep me busy – DONE.
• seven piano practice sessions – DONE.
• Continuing on my quest to catch up on Technic and Composition sections previously skipped in Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book, I will do the composing for Unit 2, Technic and Composing for Unit 3, and Technic for Unit 4 – DONE.

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 182 nights (26 weeks) in a row – DONE. Almost didn’t make it. Several nights. But fuck yeah, on the 22nd it’ll be six months, baby!
• write Morning Pages every day – did five.
• set aside dedicated daytime time to read The Book of Longings by Sue  Monk Kidd (this comes from this week’s Artist’s Way Reflections post) – DONE, and I’m almost done with the book.
• do an Artist Date – nope.

Reflections on the Week

General

I’m realizing by doing these check-ins that there’s no such thing as a typical week. This one started with all the wildfire smoke still clogging the air so badly that no one could go outside at all or open windows, and ended with the devastating death of RBG.

Once again, it was a rough and tumultuous week. I came the closest I’ve been to breaking my sleeping without the phone chain since it started, and I mean just a hair away. Sometimes it’s like what’s the point of anything?

In that vein of feeling derailed and scared and hopeless for much of the week, there’s no Better Call Saul post today, though I should be back to regularly scheduled programming next week with Episode 104.

Time Management

I find myself feeling really bogged down, partly by so much stress and worry about so many things, partly by all the activities and obligations I have going on, enough so that even without a job or school I still feel like I never have enough time for the work I’m passionate about like these goals and longer-term ones too, and partly by way too much distraction.

It’s like part of me wants to wring the most out of every fucking second of every day, seize them all and make them count, and the other part of me is so stressed out it just wants to fritter all my time away, especially on social media. It’s a real tug-of-war.

Sometimes I want to quit and cancel everything that’s not absolutely necessary because I’m feeling the weight of a lot of obligations, and they’re all things I care about but I don’t think I can keep them all and I probably need to give more thought to that.

Sometimes I just wish I were wealthy. Not for any other reason than the freedom it would afford, and maybe most of all, the means to hire someone to do the digitizing for me so I can focus on my work. I was once the hired person doing that kind of work, in different ways, and I wish I was in a position to now be able to be the employer. That would make the biggest difference in my time availability for creative work, and also would do loads to reduce my stress levels and the mental bogged-down-ness, because this project is so boggy.

I originally had a whole section in here about the digitizing project, which seems ever more pressing now that I’ve had a(nother) brush with evacuation and wildfires, but even writing about it made my stress level and boggishness skyrocket so I took it out. For all the time I’ve put in, I’d be lucky if I’ve finished 1% of the project. It’s just massive and tedious. If I could employ help, I’d be able to give someone some steady employment for awhile. Big sigh.

Social Media

I’m still struggling with Instagram and yet, I keep getting sucked in. To checking it all the time, scrolling through, searching for people, trying to find solutions for my 99 insta problems. I’m struggling to use it and struggling not to lose too much time to it and its addictive ways. I’m thinking a lot about strategies for managing social media time better, because I do lose sooooooo much time to it every day, and yet also get a lot out of it.

This post will be my first time putting a post here up on Insta.

Goals for this Coming Week

Writing

• work on Moonchild (writing project) all seven days
• work on blog at least five days
• at least seven sessions of digitizing old writing
• craft and send an important tweet

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions
• get up through song 100 of Book One of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – which means FINISHING BOOK ONE!
• seven piano practice sessions
• Continuing on my quest to catch up on Technic and Composition sections previously skipped in Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book, I will do the composing for Unit 4, technic and compositing for Unit 5, and technic and composing for unit 6. Then I’ll be all caught up and can continue forward

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 189 nights (27 weeks) in a row
• write Morning Pages every day
• don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages – this is back on
• Finish The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd – I’m very close to the end – and start a new book. Not sure yet what I’ll start with, as I’m in a few different book clubs and have so much I want to read
• do an Artist Date

Well, that’s all for now. I’m off to try to make a post about this post on Insta and then to do some Artist’s Way tasks, then read. Also, burning a candle for the first time in awhile, since now it’s an okay thing to do again.

Have a great week everyone! If you have any goals you want to share in the comments, please do!

-April

PD: The picture for this post is a handful of the notebooks that need digitizing. There are eight notebooks in the picture, of varying colors, and most of them are 5-subject notebooks.

Notes:

• Morning Pages, referred to in the lifestyle section of these goals, is the practice of writing three long-hand pages right after waking up in the morning.
• You can read about them in this post where I introduce what they are and my history with them, and you can find all posts that mention Morning Pages here.
• The practice comes from The Artist’s Way, the seminal creativity book by Julia Cameron. I’m doing a weekly column called The Artist’s Way Reflections, which was introduced here in my blog re-entry post.
• Artist Dates, the practice of doing a solo activity to take time out and connect to your creativity, also comes from The Artist’s Way.
• Moonchild is the name of my memoir project, which you can read about in more detail on my Memoir page or on this old post with a rough sketch. You can also find LOTS of other posts about it here.
• You can check out other posts about goals (goalposts?) here.